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Progress! It is actually starting to come together to form a real game now on day 3. The main features added today were checkpoints, death, water, and some new art. Firstly I just wanted to mention that I now have somebody working with me on the project. Someone who read one of my posts about the game messaged me and asked if he could help me with the graphics. Since I am terrible at it, I’ve let him take over the sprite design front.

Falling into the well

Now that I have art to use instead of my black and white placeholder images, the level actually looks like a proper level now. Not only does it look like a real game, but it is starting to have an objective to it. I added in blocks that can kill you now, so these will be things like spikes or lava, and if you touch them you are killed. Luckily, I also implemented checkpoints, so after dying you get respawned at your last selected checkpoint. The checkpoints come in the form of candles. If you walk up to a candle and press x, your character will light it and it will activate that checkpoint. The last thing I added was water, just because it was easy and added some variety to the level. When your character is in water, he is basically just slowed down, so he doesn’t move as fast or jump as high.

Checkpoint candles on the right

Today felt really productive because of all the foundation code I had set up in the previous day. It is now easy for me to add all kinds of new blocks with their own functions to the game. I’ve also managed to get this system integrated with the map editor I am using so that none of the levels have to be hard coded, but can all come from file. This results in much more flexible development, and allows the artist to test his art without needing to edit the source code at all.

In order to let the artist and testers play the game, I had to export the game in a runnable jar. This proved to be more difficult than I initially thought because of the way files are handled. The way a jar gets images and files is different to the way I was using before which took me ages to figure out, but now I know better for future projects.

A challenge I had today is that I spent ages trying to figure out a bug I am having with my character’s jumping. For some reason there is a combination of keys you can press you give your character a larger jump than usual. This is something I will have to fix tomorrow as I haven’t entirely ironed out this problem. Tomorrow, I want to work on a menu interface and/or implementing sounds into the game.